“Since Obama took office, he has been abandoning one US ally after another while seeking to curry favor with one US adversary after another. At every turn, America’s allies – from Israel to Honduras, to Columbia, South Korea and Japan, to Poland and the Czech Republic – have reacted with disbelief and horror to his treachery. And at every turn, America’s adversaries – from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea and Russia – have responded with derision and contempt to his seemingly obsessive attempts to appease them.”- – Caroline Glick

Mark Steyn yesterday heresummed up the American posture last week at the United Nations in New York in Investor’sBusiness Daily -“Obama Will Disappoint Europeans As Post-American World Emerges” – -

“Although he affects a president-of-the-world manner, I don’t think Barack Obama cares much about foreign affairs one way or the other. He has a huge transformative domestic agenda designed to leave this country looking much closer to the average Continental social democracy.

His principal interest in the rest of the planet is he doesn’t need some nutjob nuking Cleveland before he’s finished reducing it to a moribund socialist swamp. And so, like many European nations, when it comes to the global scene, Obama has attitudes rather than policies. If you’re on the receiving end — like Israel, Poland, Honduras — it’s not pleasant, and it’s going to get worse.

It was striking to hear Gadhafi and Chavez profess their admiration for Obama, call him ‘our son,’ and declare their fond hope that he remain president for life.

The Chinese and Russians are more circumspect in public, and laughing their heads off in private. As for the saner members of the U.N., many Europeans still think they’ve got the American president they’ve always wanted: They would agree with John Bolton’s indictment — that this was a post-American speech by a post-American president — but mean it as high praise.

As the contours of the post-American world emerge, they will have plenty of time to reconsider their enthusiasm.” (Underscoring Forum’s)

Bolton Weighs In

On Wednesday, National Review on Line’s (NRO) Robert Costa quotedJohn Bolton – -

“Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that President Obama’s address to the U.N. was ‘a post-American speech by our first post-American president. It was a speech high on the personality of Barack Obama and high on multilateralism, but very short in advocating American interests.'”

Woolsey’s Proposed Sanction on Iran

As for the Iranian government and its emerging nuclear-weapons capability, former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey, in an exchange yesterday with NRO’s Robert Costa here, declared – -

“’I also haven’t seen anything to suggest that the Obama administration will move very decisively on economic sanctions, either.’ But, he adds, ‘I hope I’m wrong.’

‘What I would consider ‘very decisive’ is if the White House or Congress said that any company that does any kind of business with an Iranian entity — not just the Revolutionary Guards, not just oil and gas companies, but any entity — can do no business with the United States government.’

Will the Obama administration take up Woolsey’s advice? ‘I’d love to believe so,’ he says, ‘but I just don’t know. I’m certainly open to ideas.’

‘If they do not do that or something equally tough, then they will have to decide later this year or sometime early next year whether they are going to actually make it be unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, or just verbally say it’s unacceptable, then accept it. If they don’t act very, very decisively, and very, very quickly with economic pressure, then they will have to make that choice.'”

“If Zbigniew Brzezinski had his way, the US would go to war against Israel to defend Iran’s nuclear installations.

In an interview with the Daily Beast Web site last weekend, the man who served as former US president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser said, ‘They [IAF fighter jets] have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? We have to be serious about denying them that right. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not.'”

. . . . .

“Brzezinski served as a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, and his views are not terribly out of place among Obama’s senior advisers in the White House. In an interview in 2002, Samantha Powers, who serves as a senior member of Obama’s national security council, effectively called for the US to invade Israel in support of the Palestinians.”(Underscoring Forum’s)

. . . . .

“During a television interview this week, Sen. John McCain was asked for his opinion of Brzezinski’s recommendation that the US shoot down IAF jets en route to Iran in a hypothetical Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear installations. He responded with derisive laughter. And indeed, the notion that the US would go to war against Israel to protect Iran’s nuclear installations is laughably absurd.”

Is there anything that Maryland and Virginia conservatives can do to help set matters right – – apart from urging their views on members of Congress who will listen?Yesterday Middle East expert Ken Timmerman in NewsMax — “Broad Coalition Calls for Action on Iran” – – described one significant citizen remedy here – -

“A broad-based coalition of Jewish and Christian groups, labor unions, Iranian exiles, black pastors and community leaders called on President Barack Obama and the United Nations to impose tougher sanctions on Iran to prevent the Tehran regime from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.

The second day of protests against the New York visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reached across the traditional political divides in impressive fashion, with New York’s Democrat Gov. David Patterson, joining forces with the likely Republican nominee for the same job, former New York Mayor (and presidential candidate) Rudy Giuliani.

‘We don’t agree on everything,’ said Janice W. Shorenstein, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. ‘But we all agree on this: that the people of Iran deserve human dignity . . . and the right to assemble peacefully . . . The stand-by-Iran coalition will not be silenced.’

Patterson made an impassioned plea for U.S. support for Israel against the threats and weaponry of Iran’s leaders, while Giuliani called the current Iranian regime ‘an affront to the civilized world.’

The Iranian regime ‘is not only a menace to its own citizens, but is a terrible menace to all of us. All decent people should stand up against the Iranian regime,’ Giuliani added.

Liberal Jewish leaders found common ground with conservatives in their harsh criticism of the United Nations for inviting Ahmadinejad — ‘the world’s biggest bigot,’ according to one participant — to speak at the annual U.N .General Assembly in New York.”

. . . . .

“While Thursday’s rally was long on speeches and pledges of congressional action to enact new sanctions legislation, the elephant in the packed plaza across from the United Nations was President Barack Obama and his ongoing effort to ‘reach out’ to Iran’s current leaders.”

Perhaps the challenge is how to build and extend such a citizen coalition to address the Iranian nuclear-weapons peril — a coalition with political heft – – across America.

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 28! Many Americans simply are not aware of the following basic truth about the Iranian regime that Eliot Cohen spells out herein today’s Wall Street Journal (H/T NRO):

“At the heart of the problem is not simply the nuclear program. It is the Iranian regime, a regime that has, since 1979, relentlessly waged war against the U.S. and its allies. From Buenos Aires to Herat, from Beirut to Cairo, from Baghdad to, now, Caracas, Iranian agents have done their best to disrupt and kill. Iran is militarily weak, but it is masterful at subversive war, and at the kind of high-tech guerrilla, roadside-bomb and rocket fight that Hezbollah conducted in 2006. American military cemeteries contain the bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American servicemen and servicewomen slain by Iranian technology, Iranian tactics, and in somecases, Iranian operatives.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)